[TooMuchNick]

I have to complain, I've ridden BART in San Francisco for three years and had no idea I could have signed up for wifi. I wish I'd noticed the network on my phone and looked into it, but of course looking for wifi on BART never occurred to me (to save battery life I have "search for networks" turned off). I ride the train almost every day and I've never seen a notice at a station about the network. If only 16,000 people of several million in the BART service area signed up, then apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of wifi-enabled commuters never heard of this either.

And now they'll be expected to pay as much per month for a daily hour of the Internet as they do for constant access at work and home.

As a layperson, the only reasons I can see for BART to set such a high price point are a misunderstanding about the economics or a desire to keep usage at a low, manageable level.

I suspect I should be glad that there's wifi at all, at any price, but frankly $30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters rather than an intensely useful public tool for all the area's travelers. I hope against hope that the daily and hourly fees aren't high enough to remind me of AOL-by-the-hour. To think we've reached a point where the privately owned cafes give away wireless, and the publicly owned transit charges for it.

[patio11]

$30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters

I don't think you have to be that highly paid at all for this to make a whole lot of sense. 30 minutes a workday is 10 hours a month, minimum, spent on rapid transit. That time is lost to you unless you have some way to make use of it -- and the Internet for time-shifting either productive labor or errands makes a whole lot of sense.

I have roughly 4 hours of daily commute (yay, Japan) and would give my spleen to have sustained connectivity (and room to open a laptop). It would give me essentially two workweeks for free -- and believe me, I'd put them to use.

[jonursenbach]

I'd rather have them charge for the WiFi service in liu of raising, already above national public transit average, prices to give it away for free.

[TooMuchNick]

The difference of magnitude between the revenue of the proposed wifi charges and the revenue of BART ticket prices is so staggering that a comparison makes little sense. It's much more likely that money could be taken from another area of costs than that the cost of wifi would affect ticket prices.

I'm not saying the money will appear out of nowhere, but it's certainly not staggering if the current charge structure is expected to create a profit for the company that installed the network.